Here are some random photos from our trip this past November. Thought that I would just post them and come back later with some comments and explanations. Here we go …

Honolulu from over at Queen’s Beach by the Aquarium. Took the photo and the worked it up as a painting in Photoshop for something different. I was not planning on commenting but just felt the urge ….

The Mokes in the distance. Lanakai Beach on the island of Oahu. Across the island from Honolulu.

Blue Hawaii in honor of Elvis Presley’s birthday 8 January, which was yesterday. Elvis loved Hawaii. Stayed at the Hilton Hawaiian Hotel. They still have the Elvis Suite that you can rent and no, I did not bother to ask the price.

The Hilton Hawaiian Hotel at the Hawaiian Village on Waikiki Beach in downtown Honolulu. If you look closely you can see the ghost of Elvis waving to you on the top left balcony.

The Duke Kahananoku statue on Waikiki Beach.

Just some random beach on the North Shore…

Could not end this without a surfing photo. This was taken at the Van’s World Surfing Tour at Haliewa back in November. I will post more later. You can go to my Instagram (@frankphardy) to see a lot more. I have been posting mostly to it, the reason that I have not posted anything for the last few months to any of my blogs. It just seems easier and I seem to attract more viewers than I have ever reached with my blogs. But I am not going to abandon them because there are some thing I want to accomplish with them. Please feel free to comment and ask any questions that you might have. Until next time ….

These photos are ones that I took out at Pensacola Beach from earlier this year. I want to say that all were taken from the Pier out on the beach. All have been posted on my Instagram account and several have been enhanced with a program called Plotagraph which adds motion to a still image. In the image above, I was able to add motion to the waves so that they roll in and then recede. I will try to add several here in the next few days, but in the meantime here are some surfing photos …

And finally one I titled ” Heading In “…

I have been posting mostly to my Instagram account over the past few months, but I have not totally given up on my blog and I plan to get back into regularly posting to my two blogs shortly. You can find me on Instagram at @frankhardyphoto or you can go to the search panel and just type in Frank Hardy Photography. Thanks for looking and if you have any questions or comments, please let me hear them.

I have not been posting much on these blogs since I post to Instagram. I am at @frankphardy on Instagram for those of you that might be interested and see what I throw up on it. I seem to attract more attention there that I have on this blog. But I do not plan on getting rid of this blog since I have had it so long. Here are a few new images and several that I have reworked. Enjoy …

I am sort of all over the place with these images from California to Ireland to Memphis to back to California and I started it off on Pensacola Beach. Thanks for looking and please check back, I have some concert negatives that I have acquired from back in the 1960’s and 70’s that I plan to post in the near future. Don’t forget to go to my Instagram feed … @frankphardy … and see my work there. Feel free to comment and thanks for looking ….

Greetings … I’ve been busy the last month or so and I missed posting anything in December. In fact, that was the first month that I missed posting since I started this personal photography blog. The above photo was taken on a trip to Seattle at the Pike Street Market last month. I have a lot of images that I am shifting through and will post in the months to come. Most are just a bunch of random “grab” shots that I thought looked interesting at time, but I know that I have a handful of award winners … that is joke, pitiful as it is. This was my first trip to Washington and it is a beautiful area. We really had a nice time, even though it was short. Here are several more …

This little church was at a winery on San Juan Island just up the road from Friday Harbor. I cannot remember the name of the winery or the exact location, but it was only a few miles up the road from the actual harbor itself. The last photo is of the Lime Kiln Lighthouse on San Juan Island. It is located only a few miles from Roche Harbor …

This is just a tight crop of the entire image that I posted on my Instagram account. The island in the background is Canada and I think that is the island that Victoria is on. I plan on doing something more with this image … different crop, border, framing. Not sure what at this point. Thanks again for looking. I have a lot of other random images from this trip and from the few days that we spent out on Pensacola Beach at Portofino. Hope everyone had a safe and happy holidays, we did. Looking forward to seeing what 2017 has in store. Stay safe and please check back … Frank

This is the Rex Parade on Canal Street in downtown New Orleans back in the 1907 Mardi Gras celebration. The theme for that year was ” Visions on Nations “, with each float being a different country. I bought the original photograph from someone on Ebay and it was not in very good condition – stains, corners bent and torn, etc. It took me several hours to get it to look like this, but I think that it is a pretty interesting image. Parts of Canal Street look like the building on the near right side even today in 2016. Times have really changed … I don’t see any of these parade goers screaming and waving their arms shouting ” Throw me something Mister! ” or whatever else they do now a days ( and I think you know what I mean … wink, wink ). If anyone has any images of New Orleans from this time period, I would be interested in seeing what you have. Thanks for looking and don’t forget that I post frequently and often to my Instagram ( frankphardy ) account. Hope everyone had a safe and happy Thanksgiving … ours was. Please check back ….

This photograph of the Delchamps grocery store in downtown Pensacola at the corner of Garden and Baylen Streets was taken by photographer Charles Cottrell sometime around 1920 or so. My father worked at this store sometime in the late 1920’s or early 30’s. His mother ran a boarding house on Garden Street where Gulf Winds Credit Union is today. He also played for their basketball team and I have a group photo of the team over at the other blog I have, which is about my father’s photography. The building is still there today, but it has been converted to office space and is a bank currently. Look at all of the oil stains out front of the store … I guess pressure washers have not been invented when this photo was taken. Also, you have to wonder the people’s drive ways looked like during this time since cars had only been in existence for twenty or thirty years when this was made. This photo is part of archives at UWF in the basement of the library that is available for anyone to search through and download.

Which brings me to my next point, I have started to give some of my father’s negatives to Dean DeBolt and his staff for archiving. If you read my blogs, I mentioned several years ago where I have given thousands of his negatives to the Pensacola Historical Society. The Historical Society is now part of the UWF Historical Trust. I went out and talked to them earlier in the week and gave them some negatives that my father had taken of Florida Governor Dan McCarty in Milton Florida back in 1952. As time goes on, I am going to be donating more, so stay tuned. Go check the UWF Archives and see all that they have. I am adding a link for the site here.

Thanks for looking and as usual, all comments are welcomed and appreciated … Frank

This photo of the Santa Barbara Mission was made back in 1915. I have purchased several negatives of various missions through the years and have never done anything with them. I have only been to the missions in Oceanside – Mission San Luis Rey – and the one where Alfred Hitchcock made the movie “Vertigo”, Mission San Juan Bautista. There are twenty one missions in the state of California, so two down, nineteen more to go. I thought that I had posted some photos already of these missions, but just going back through the last year or so it looks like I have not. I made a good number of images at the Oceanside Mission and I must have only posted them on my Instagram account. No idea who took this photo. I just scanned the negative and did a little Photoshop work on the file just to clean it up a bit. Here is a link to some information on Spanish Missions.

If you ever get a chance to travel to California, do yourself a favor and find a mission near where you are staying and go pay it a visit. It is really amazing to read and see how these people lived back in the 1600 and 1700’s. Thanks for visiting and feel free to comment if you have been here to the Santa Barbara Mission or any of the California Missions.